For a while now, we have noticed that if we want to get organised and get Reggae Speed done right, and in order to meet deadlines, we would need a comprehensive toolset to improve our workflow. I made a post yesterday about our new private Repository and File sharer, but I have now expanded it to be a full blown toolkit.

The toolkit now incorporates:

A Source Repository, allowing us programmers to upload code to an SVN, classify it by build, specify any known bugs, limitations or features of the code, and it even has fancy features where you just specify a build, e.g. 1.81, and it will automatically download all the code which has been uploaded for that build.

A standard file sharing system for uploading, classifying, ordering and downloading files from other team members.

A snapshot of our File Sharing system. You can see Jan's Game Documentation that I uploaded, it's also specifying the version number. I'm just implementing a feature now which allows you to search through files/code/software based upon the version number in the Repository, and the Toolkit will always default to downloading the latest version of whatever file you are attempting to download, even going so far as to query it with you if you attempt to download an old version of a file.

A task planner. This task planner allows us to specify tasks for ourselves and other team members, and then update them with a percentage, and the system can also calculate the time required to complete certain task. Also, it is intelligent enough to be able to calculate and predict the percentage completion of the project on a whole, and it can even tell you if you're going to be able to meet certain deadlines using special time/efficiency algorithms!

This image shows off the Task Planner and the Productivity/Project Dashboard of the toolkit. You can see the list of tasks with their completion percentage, their estimated completion date, as well as the percentage completion of the entire project (15.8%), the budget (currently $0.00) as well as the scheduled project hours (79). And, all of this has been calculated directly by the toolkit!

A project and productivity manager. This is similar to the previous feature, but it allows us developers to clock hours as we work them, specify what task we're specifically working on, and update our progress on certain tasks. The toolkit can also specify, based upon the calculated work efficiency based upon your clocked hours, how long it thinks it will take a team member to complete a certain task.

A finance and budget tracker. This will eliminate the need for the 'Biomass Studios Expenses' thread on the Forums. The software has a simple economics app which can track the team's budget parameters, what has been spent on what, and store it all in a nice little spreadsheet!

The toolkit is easily moddable, it's built upon SourceForge's website framework, using a dotProject PHP backend, so I can easily add, change, remove or update features as you tell me to!

The toolkit is located here: https://sourceforge.net/apps/dotproject/reggae-speed/. In order to access it, you will need a SourceForge account (it only takes 2 seconds to create one if you don't already have one). Then, just send me your SourceForge Login Name and specified Email Address, and I can grant you full access to the toolkit and repository, and you can start using it immediately!